Transart Institute: The International MFA and PhD Creative Practice Programs with Intensives in New York and Berlin, individual advisement and critique groups wherever you live and work. Accredited by Plymouth University, UK.

Transart Advisor Jenny Perlin exhibits in The Silent Way, New York

Simon Preston Gallery is delighted to present The Silent Way, a group show featuring works by Robert Breer, Matthew Buckingham and Jenny Perlin. The exhibition opens on 12 January and runs until 23 February, 2014. The works in the exhibition each examine our understanding of perception and time, employing both the esoteric and systematic language of pedagogy.

Matthew Buckingham’s Celeritas, 2009, installed in daylight in the front gallery, uses a scientific equation to shift our sense of the present. A wooden cabinet encloses a chalkboard printed with white letters, denoting the speed of light hitting its surface in chalk. Analytically illustrating the properties of light, we are prompted to contemplate the limits of our temporal perception, suggesting that our lives unfold somewhere between seemingly instantaneous light speed and imperceptibly slow geological time.

Robert Breer (1926-2011), known for his experimental practice spanning over fifty years, playfully explores our understanding of visual perception. Of his extensive and revolutionary series of films, Form Phases (1954-1956) most exemplifies this inquiry. Based on his earlier abstract geometric paintings, and created frame-by-frame using index cards, Breer created dense, rhythmic compositions of form and color. Morphing in and out of the frames, in a constant state of flux, these geometries reveal the role of movement in our understanding of visual recognition.

Jenny Perlin exhibits a 16mm film derived from the work of Caleb Gattegno, a mathematician and educator who pioneered a visual systematic method for teaching foreign languages and mathematics. The film begins with hand-painted animated color fields, each corresponding to a vowel or consonant sound of the English language according to Gattegno’s system. The second part of the film animates excerpts from A Thousand Sentences, Gattegno’s book written to function as a primer for English learners to practice reading simple texts. Yet in its selection of phrases, it also represents the author’s view that the world can be learned solely through experience and common sense.